The new mess hall on the base is barely big enough to hold all the troops now present on base. When I walk in, almost all the tables are occupied. Sergeant Fallon and her HD entourage are seated near the back of the room by one of the exit hatches, and she waves me over. I make my way through the crowd and sit down with the HD grunts.
“Wonder what they have to say to us that requires every pair of boots in the same room,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“Beats me,” I say. “This is a first.”
The brass don’t make us wait too long. We hop to attention when the garrison company’s CO and the battalion commanders walk into the room. Both the HD officers are lieutenant colonels and outrank the SI officer who is merely a major, but the SI major is clearly in charge.
“Listen up, people,” he says. “The task force commander wants to address all units.”
“Attention, all hands,” a voice comes out of the address system. “This is General Pearce, Commanding Officer, Task Force 230.7.
“I’ll cut right to the chase, gentlemen. We have arrived in the Fomalhaut system, and here we will stay. We are reinforcing the garrison here on New Svalbard. The reason for all those extra supplies is this: Our stay here is open-ended.
“The good news, if you can call it that, is that fleet Intel finally figured out how the Lankies move around, and how they find our colonies. The bad news is that the ugly bastards use our own Alcubierre networks against us.”
At this revelation, not even military discipline and briefing protocol can stop the assembled troops from voicing their surprise. All at once, a few hundred conversations break out in the room. I look at the SI major, and notice with some satisfaction that he seems just as surprised as we are. Fleet Command played their cards closely on this one, and even though I had guessed that the grunts were going to get the short end of the stick again, the magnitude of the news leaves me momentarily gut-punched.
“We don’t know how they pull it off exactly, but we do know that the Lankies use our transition nodes—ours and the SRA’s—to pinpoint our colonies. We’ve basically set up a bunch of blinking road signs for them. Therefore, Fleet has decided to shut the whole network down until we figure out how to counter those seed ships. Our transition to Fomalhaut was the last one before Fleet turned off the transit node on the solar system side. The beacons are deactivated, and the transition points are being mined with nukes right now.”
“Shut it!” the major at the front of the room shouts when the swelling din of exclamations from the assembled garrison threatens to overwhelm the audio from the overhead address system, where the general is undoubtedly on a one-way feed. The noise level in the room decreases, but not by much.
“…can’t tell you how long this task force will be on station in this system. I can tell you, however, that we will fly the flag of the Commonwealth on New Svalbard for however long it takes—a month, a year, or more. We will defend this moon against any threat, whether Russian, Chinese, or Lanky, until Command reopens the Alcubierre network and relieves us.
“Until that happens, nothing will change. Promotion schedules are still in effect. Anyone whose term of enlistment expires during our stay will be able to reenlist for another regular term, or have their original term extended until we get back to Earth. Those of you who choose to serve another full enlistment will be eligible for an additional discharge bonus.”
Some of the troopers at the table let out suppressed laughs at this. The HD soldiers are mostly either shell-shocked or talking amongst themselves. The commotion in the room is at an entirely unacceptable level for an address by a general officer, but the brass at the front of the room don’t make much of an effort to suppress the noise.
“I expect every one of you to keep doing your duty until we are relieved and called home. The ships of the task force will set up a picket and assume orbital-patrol duties.
“We’re in a good position, tactically speaking. We have enough ordnance to hold off a superior force, and enough supplies to stay on independent duty out here for many months. We have two battalions plus on the ground, with combat teams of at least platoon strength at every terraforming station. We have an embarked regiment on the Midway that can drop onto any trouble spot on the moon within an hour. We have all the gear and troops we need to give a bloody nose to half a brigade of SRA marines. And if the Lankies find this rock before the fleet calls us back, we’ll throw everything we have at them the second the first of them puts a toe on this moon.”
Every Spaceborne Infantry grunt in the room knows that if the Lankies want the place, they’ll take it, regardless of the number of rifles we point at them. The general’s little pep talk is probably designed to make the HD contingent less anxious about getting dumped on a backwoods moon to mount a hopeless defense, but I can see on the faces all around me that the bullshit detectors of the Homeworld Defense troopers are just as finely calibrated as ours.